Paper Doll (3 page)

On her desk was an in-basket, empty, and an out-basket with a letter in it. There was also a phone, a lamp with a green glass shade, two manila file folders, and to one side a hardback copy of a novel by P. D. James.

“Good morning,” she said. Her voice was full of polished overtones. She sounded like she really thought it was a good morning, and hoped that I did too.

I told her who I was. She seemed thrilled to meet me.

“Mr. Tripp is at his club,” she said. “I’m sure he didn’t realize you were coming.”

She was wearing taupe hose that fitted her legs perfectly.

“Actually I’d just as soon talk with you,” I said.

She lowered her eyes for a moment, and smiled.

“Really?” she said.

I was probably not the first guy to say that to her, nor, in fact, the first guy to mean it. I hooked a red leather side chair over to her desk and sat down. She smiled again. Ready to help.

“You know I’m looking into Mrs. Tripp’s murder?”

“Yes,” she said. “How terrible for them all.”

“Yes,” I said. “How’s business?”

She shifted slightly in her chair. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

“How’s business here?” I said.

“I… I don’t see why you ask.”

“Don’t know what else to ask,” I said.

“I’ve talked with the police,” she said.

Her big eyes looked puzzled but hopeful. She’d like to help, but how?

“I know,” I said. “No point in saying all that again. So we’ll talk about other stuff. Like business. How is it, are you busy?”

She frowned. Conflicting emotional states were a breeze for her. A pretty frown, an understated hip wiggle, a slight shift in her eyes. It was beautiful to see.

“It… it’s not that kind of business.”

“What kind?”

“The kind where you can say how’s business?” she said and smiled so warmly that I almost asked her to dance.

“Are you busy?” I said.

“Well, no, not in a regular business sense.”

“What are your hours?”

“Nine to four,” she said.

“And Mr. Tripp?”

“Oh, he’s usually here when I arrive, and he frequently leaves after I do. I’ve offered to come earlier and stay longer, but Mr. Tripp says that is not necessary.”

“Is he busier than you are?”

“I… well, frankly, I don’t see why he would be.”

“And how busy are you?”

She shrugged and spread her hands. Her nails were beautifully manicured and painted a pale pink.

“There are some phone calls, there are some letters. Sometimes I make restaurant reservations, sometimes travel arrangements…” She paused. “I read a great deal.”

“Good for the mind,” I said. “They eat out a lot?”

“Mr. Tripp has lunch with people nearly every day.”

“Dinner?”

“I rarely make dinner reservations,” she said.

“They travel much?”

She uncrossed her legs, and crossed them the other way. When she had them recrossed, she smoothed her skirt along the tops of her thighs.

“Mostly I make arrangements for the children, during school vacations.”

“They do a lot of that?”

“Oh, yes, they’re very well traveled. Vail or Aspen usually, in the winter. Europe sometimes, during summer vacations. And they were always flying off to visit friends from college.”

“Family travel much together?” I said.

“Mr. Tripp and the children would sometimes go places, especially when the children were small.”

“Ms. Nelson?” I said.

“I don’t think Ms. Nelson liked to travel,” she said.

I sat for a while and chewed on that. Ann Summers sat quietly, pointing her stunning knees at me: alert, compliant, calm, and stunning.

“And Mr. Tripp comes here early, and leaves late, even though there’s not much work to do?”

She nodded.

“What do you think of that?” I said.

She paused for a moment, and bit her lower lip very gently, for a moment. Then she shook her head.

“I am Mr. Tripp’s employee. I like to think also that I am his friend. In either capacity I am entirely loyal to him,” she said. “I would not speculate about his personal life.”

“Not even to me,” I said, “after what we’ve meant to each other?”

Ann Summers shook her head slowly.

Her smile was warm. Her teeth were very white and even. Her eyes were lively, maybe even inviting. There was something about her that whispered inaudibly of silk sheets and lace negligees, some unarticulated hint of passion, motionless beneath the flawless tranquility of her appearance. I sat for a moment and inhaled it, admired it, contemplated the clear, unexpressed certainty that exotic carnal excess was mine for the asking.

We both knew the moment and understood it.

“Monogamy is not an unmixed blessing,” I said.

She nodded slightly, and smiled serenely. “Please feel free,” she said, “if you need anything else…” She made a little flutter with her hands.

I stood.

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks for your help.” I was pleased that my voice didn’t rasp.

At the door I looked back at her, still motionless, legs crossed, smiling. The sunlight from the east window behind her caught the red highlights in her hair. Her hands rested motionless on her thighs. The promise of possibility shimmered in the room between us for another long moment. Then I took in a big breath of air and went out and closed the door.

Tripp was wearing a banker’s gray Brooks Brothers suit with narrow lapels, and three buttons, and trousers ending at least two inches short of his feet. He had on a narrow tie with black and silver stripes, and scuffed brown shoes with wing tips. You knew he was wealthy.

Tripp shook hands democratically.

“Good of you to come,” he said, although I had requested the lunch.

The Harvard Club looked the way it was supposed to. High ceilings and carpeted floors and on the walls pictures of gray-haired WASPs in dark suits. We went to the dining room and sat. Tripp ordered a Manhattan. I had a club soda.

“Don’t you drink?” Tripp said. He sounded a little suspicious.

“I’m experimenting,” I said, “with intake modification.”

“Ah,” he said.

We looked at menus. The cuisine ran to baked scrod and minute steak. The waiter brought our drinks. Tripp drank half his Manhattan. I savored a sip of club soda. We ordered.

“Now,” Tripp said, “how can I help you?”

“If it is not too painful,” I said, “tell me about your family.”

“It is not too painful,” Tripp said. “What do you wish to know?”

“Whatever you wish to tell me. Talk about them a little, your wife, your kids, what they liked to do, how they got along, anything interesting about them. I’m just looking for a place to start.”

Tripp smiled courteously. “Of course,” he said.

He gestured at the waiter to bring him a second Manhattan. I declined a second club soda. I still had plenty left of the first one. Club sodas seemed to last longer than vodka martinis on the rocks with a twist.

“We were,” Tripp said, “just about an ideal family. We were committed to one another, loved one another, cared about one another completely.”

I nodded. The waiter brought the second Manhattan. Tripp drained the remainder of the first one and handed the glass to the waiter. The waiter completed the exchange and moved away. Tripp stared at the new Manhattan without drinking any.

“The thing was,” he said, “not only were Olivia and I husband and wife, we were pals. We enjoyed each other. We enjoyed our children.”

He paused, still staring at the untouched drink in front of him. He shuddered briefly. “To have so good a thing shattered so terribly…”

I waited. He picked up the Manhattan and took a small sip and replaced it. I ignored my club soda.

“I know it sounds, probably, too good to be true, nostalgia or something, but, by golly, it was good. There’ll never be anyone like her.”

He broke off and we sat quietly. In the silence the waiter brought our lunch. I had opted for a chicken sandwich. Tripp had scrod. The food was every bit as good as it was at the Harvard Faculty Club where I had eaten a couple of years ago.

There weren’t many women in the dining room. At a table next to the wall two men in suits were ordering more drinks. One of them was a U.S. Senator, still pink from the steam room, whose drink, when it arrived, appeared to be a tall dark scotch and soda. At the table next to me were three guys dressed by the same costumer. All wore dark blue suits with a thin chalk stripe, white shirts with discreetly rolled button-down collars, red ties. The ties varied-one red with tiny white dots, one a darker red with blue stripes, one blue paisley on a red background. He who would be a man must be a non-conformist. One of them was holding forth. He was large without being muscular, and his neck spilled out a little over his collar.

“So there’s Buffy,” he was saying, “bare ass in the middle of the fucking tennis court, and…”

“I suppose it seems idealized to you,” Tripp said. “I imagine people tend to talk that way after a great loss.”

“I just listen,” I said.

“And make no judgments?”

“Open-shuttered and passive,” I said. “Not thinking, merely recording.”

“Always?”

“At least until all the precincts are heard from,” I said.

“I would find that difficult, I guess,” Tripp said.

I chewed on my chicken sandwich. The chicken had traveled some distance from the coop. The slices in my sandwich were perfectly round and wafer thin. But the bread was white, and the pale lettuce was limp.

I finished chewing and said, “What I do requires a certain amount of distance, sort of a willful suspension, I suppose.”

“A what?”

I shook my head. “Literary allusion,” I said. “I was just showing off.”

“Olivia was a great one for that. She was always quoting somebody.”

“She taught literature, did she not?”

“Yes, and theater, at Shawmut College. Her students loved her.”

I nodded. I was trying to pick up the conversation at the next table. They were discussing what Buffy had tattooed on her buttocks.

“She was a marvelous teacher,” Tripp said. He was eating his scrod at a pace that would take us into the dinner hour. If he and Susan had an eating race you couldn’t get a winner.

The Senator had finished one dark scotch and soda, and had another, partly drunk, in his left hand. He was table-hopping. At the table next to us he paused long enough to hear the end of Buffy’s adventure, and laughed and said something in an undertone to the story teller. The whole table laughed excessively. It was clannish laughter, the laughter of insiders, us-boys. It was almost certainly laughter about the aptly named Buffy. Men never laughed quite that way about anything but women in a sexual context. And it was sycophantic laughter, tinged with gratitude that a man of the Senator’s prominence had shared with them not only a salacious remark but a salacious view of life.

“Old enough to bleed,” the Senator said, “old enough to butcher.”

The table was again frantic with grateful hilarity as the Senator turned toward us. The pinkness in his face had given way to a darker red. A tribute perhaps to the dark scotch and soda. He was nearly bald but had combined his hair in the bald man’s swoop up from behind one ear, arranged over the baldness, and lacquered in place with hair spray. A smallish man, he looked in good shape. His three-piece blue suit fit him well, and his vest didn’t gapno mean achievement in a politician. When he turned toward us, his expression was grave. He put a hand on Tripp’s shoulder.

“Loudon,” he said. “How you holding up?”

Tripp looked up at the Senator and nodded. “As well as one could expect, Senator, thanks.”

The Senator looked at me, but Tripp didn’t introduce us.

“I’m Bob Stratton,” the Senator said, and put out his hand. I said my name and returned his handshake. If he really saw me at all, it was peripherally. In his public self he probably saw everything peripherally. His focus was him.

“Any progress yet in finding the son of a bitch?”

Tripp shook his head.

“Not really,” he said. “Spenser here is working on it for me.”

“You’re a police officer?” the Senator said.

“Private,” I said.

“Really?” he said. “Well, you need any doors open, you call my office.”

“Sure,” I said.

“You have a card?” the Senator said. “I want to alert my people in case you need help.”

I gave him a card. He looked at it for a moment, and nodded to himself, and put the card in his shirt pocket. And put his hand back on Tripp’s shoulder.

“You hang tough, Loudon. Call me anytime.”

Tripp smiled wanly.

“Thanks, Senator.”

The Senator squeezed Tripp’s shoulder and moved off toward another table, slurping a drink of dark scotch and soda as he went.

“Fine man,” Tripp said. “Fine Senator, fine man.”

“E pluribus unum,” I said.